


deep in the coffin, deep in the earth

by allgoodlions



Category: Carmilla (Web Series), Carmilla - Fandom
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, i guess, mostly - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 06:21:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4468577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allgoodlions/pseuds/allgoodlions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The dark blood crept up the sides of the coffin, matting wet fingers into her hair, folding over her legs. It wasn’t cold and it wasn’t warm, but it was <i>wrong</i>. And it was heavy. It pushed at her, reached grasping, greasy hands around her ankles and her wrists. It clasped a heavy, black necklace around her throat and stole up the sides of her neck although she craned away from it. Panic blossomed in her stomach and scrabbled into her throat, squeezing past the fence of her teeth and out into the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	deep in the coffin, deep in the earth

Carmilla groped blindly about her with hands that shook, fingertips rasping, ringing faintly along beveled iron. The coffin was wider at her shoulders, narrowing as it reached her feet. No room to move or turn or bend her knees. And it was dark; a heavy, suffocating darkness that puddled against her eyes, seeming almost to have a texture all its own.

She pressed her hands against the close-fitting lid scant inches from her upturned face. The metal was icy, night-chilled, and it bit at her palms. It wouldn't budge; she knew. Knew it before she touched it. Knew it deep inside with a heavy sort of inevitability that was familiar and bitter.

It was familiar because endings were what she knew best -- she was made up of endings, a thousand lives stolen to sustain her own. She was shadow and teeth and blood, bright red and warm on her lips. The thing in the dark that hunted, the reason for bolted doors and curtained windows. It was written into her bones, and she had embraced it, which was why she was Maman's favorite. Perfect and hard and selfish and cruel -- Maman had made her these things and loved her for them.

Ell had seen her differently though. Somehow, Ell had seen something in Carmilla. Some _one_ , actually. Someone who could be true and brave and strong. She'd seen somebody good, and Carmilla had tentatively begun to believe it. She had seen herself reflected in Ell's eyes, and in them she saw somebody worth loving, worth _being_. So, for Ell, she had tried to be these things, or maybe just one thing. Worthy -- she'd tried to be worthy. Or worthwhile, at least.

But she was not true or strong or very brave at all. She was only what her mother made her.

Ell had seen that, too, in the end.

Swallowing hard against the bitter guilt that balled up in her stomach, she steeled herself and heaved against solid iron. Her tendons popped and her bones creaked, and she willed the coffin lid to break, to bend -- _please just bend just move just a little just enough_. Enough -- to what? To break free, perhaps, but never to _be_ free. She would be dragged back into the type of living she had known for centuries -- full of taking and killing and ending. She wasn't strong enough to break from that. She thought she never would be, and now it hardly mattered.

A muscle tore in her neck, and a thread of fire raced up her spine and spilled, burning, into the base of her skull. She subsided, gasping, and her harsh breaths echoed mockingly back at her. Baring her teeth, she threw herself bodily upward, into the comfort of a struggle that was hopelessly Sisyphean. The sheer physical effort was mind-numbing, squeezing her thoughts down to the singular: _tried_.

_At least I tried. I tried to be the hero you needed me to be. Tried to save you. Tried to run. Tried to break out of this coffin, this life. I tried, Ell. I did. I tried. I --_

She was startled into stillness by the distinct grumble of metal against metal, and a section of the coffin lid slid away. Light from the waning gibbous of a dying moon thrust through a small circular aperture, perhaps no wider than the circumference of her wrist. The cold bar of light pierced the dark of the coffin and splashed across Carmilla's chest, casting everything in sharp, silvered relief; blinding and accusatory.  
  
With a curse, Carmilla ripped at that small, bright opening, prying at it with her fingertips until they tore and bled.

She jerked back a moment later as something wet and stinging struck her eye and dribbled down her cheek. She wristed it away, and the smear on her skin was black as ink. The coppery stink of it was unmistakable: blood. Old blood, viscous and purple-toned, the color of old wine dried on the rim of a glass. Several heavy drops pattered onto her upturned face and the bright white of her chemise. Beads of dark blood soaked into the fabric, a spreading stain.

The singular droplets became a steady stream, and Carmilla instinctively turned her face away. She snorted and coughed as blood splashed into her nose and pooled in her ears. The small stream gave way to a flood, and realization dawned in a moment of terrible clarity that made her throat choke down, trapping sound, trapping air.

The dark blood crept up the sides of the coffin, matting wet fingers into her hair, folding over her legs. It wasn't cold and it wasn't warm, but it was _wrong_. And it was heavy. It pushed at her, reached grasping, greasy hands around her ankles and her wrists. It clasped a heavy, black necklace around her throat and stole up the sides of her neck although she craned away from it. Panic blossomed in her stomach and scrabbled into her throat, squeezing past the fence of her teeth and out into the world. She hadn't meant to, but she screamed. She screamed until the blood crested the edges of her temples and oozed lazily into the hollows of her eyelids. She screamed until it spilled into her mouth; she drowned.  
  
Something slid shut above her. Something final. Something ending.

The uncertain sensation of being carried, of being lowered, a sliding and settling. A muffled thump and scatter of -- _of earth_. The realization slid through her, cresting on a fresh wave of panic. Not merely drowned, but buried, too. _Oh, Maman. Maman, no._ Gradually, the regular tumble of dirt grew muted and farther away. Then it ceased altogether, and all that was left was the sigh and mutter of loose dirt as it settled around her.

Then nothing.

Slowly, the dark blood cooled. Syrupy and thick, it teetered on the edge of clotting and knitted its clutching fingers around her. The sensation of being encased and entombed scraped at the edges of her, igniting an instinctive insect-in-amber terror each time she thrashed and fought against the tight, insinuating threads of congealing blood.

If breathing had still been a necessity, it would have come in sharp, panicked bursts. And her heart -- that small and withered thing-- if her heart had beat at all, it would have hammered a mindless staccato against her ribs: _oh god oh god oh god oh--_  
  
But she didn’t breathe. And her heart lay still and heavy in her her chest. And panic wrapped tight arms around her ribs and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. A snarl or a curse or a scream -- a _sound_ \-- bubbled up in her throat, but the blood's viscous weight pressed at her lips and pushed the sound back until it hissed through her chest, a high-pitched, animal whine that left her throat hot and stripped raw.

A bone-deep ache wicked along her clenched jaw, and if she cried --  
  
But no. Vampires never cried.

Carmilla squeezed her eyes so tightly shut that bursts of color exploded behind her eyes, rings of dull red and green and yellow fire etched tiny echoes of stars against the night sky of her eyelids.

She'd never see the stars again.

Not the stars or the sun or the sky, the clouds, the rain. Sweet wine in her mouth, the manicured grass of a broad and sunwarmed lawn beneath her fingers, the wind riffling through her hair -- the weight of Ell's head against her shoulder as they gazed at the bright constellations wheeling overhead. That was gone. _Ell_ was gone.

Oh, Ell.

Maman could not have devised a crueler torture. The blood filling the coffin would sustain her. She would never die, only rot across the centuries knowing that the world spun on without her. Knowing that Ell was dead and that she had died thinking Carmilla a monster.

Carmilla sagged, and the blood cradled her, bundled like a child in coppery arms. It was soothing, almost. A deep-water quiet, undisturbed by the thunder of a heart that had gone centuries unused.

 _Lay down and sleep now,_ said the deep silence which had her voice. _No need to fight. You don't have to be brave anymore, and you were never that strong. You were true, though. You were true in the end, and you can cling to that, but it's over._

And it was. Ell was gone, ripped away from her. As was her life by Maman's side. Full of killing and blood, yes, but full of wonder and exploration age after age. It was all lost to her. All over. All ended.

So, too, was the ever-present fear of discovery -- either by Maman or Ell. She was grateful for that in some strange way. She didn't have to hide anymore, didn't have to choose one life over another. She could hate Maman and mourn Ell.

She thought perhaps she had been waiting a long time for this ending, for somebody to choose for her so that she would never have to.

She did cry then. At first, it was out of that small relief, but shame cracked the thin veneer. Covering her face with her hands, she turned away and pressed her forehead to cold, slick metal, though nobody was left to see. Airless sobs wrenched at her lungs, echoing with the hollow loss of something vital. The sure and awful knowledge of Ell's death beat against the stone of her, a relentless tide that undermined any strength she had left. She crumbled into it and remembered.

The memories were sharp as broken glass, but sweet and perfect despite their edges. She touched them one by one, turning them over in her mind, recalling every fleeting minute. So much of Ell was wrapped up in words and sounds and scents, small moments in time that seemed so insignificant in their conception. But Carmilla would have given anything to spend one more insignificant moment with her.

One by one she tucked each part of Ell away, folding the savage edges into the deepest, darkest parts of herself, where they cut and cut and cut.

In a year or five years or fifty, the edges grew dull in the way that all old memories do. The deep wounds inside of her scarred, and the relentless tumble of years plucked and tugged, until Ell's memory slid just out of focus. Carmilla could never quite recall the exact shade of her hair or the shape of her eyes. But sometimes she would catch a glimpse of her face, the feel of her skin, the taste of her mouth.

The white flicker of her skirts as she left the room and Carmilla's thoughts.

***

She drifted -- or dreamed. Time canted sideways and scrolled away, twisting around and beneath and through memories that were frail as old silk curtains, catching on her and tearing like cobwebs. These were her oldest memories. Human memories drained of color: people and places she hadn't thought of in centuries.

Her parents were faceless and distant figures. Solid and stern and ornately dressed, she knew she must look like them. She supposed her mother had brown eyes, and perhaps her father had thick, dark hair. But that was only the impression of a portrait that had hung on the wall of a house that was probably a ruin now. It was easier to recall the painting's gilded frame, which had hung at about the level of her eyes when she was small.

The lines of the house were sketched indistinctly in her mind, but she had the faint sense of running through the halls in something long and cumbersome that she hiked up to her knees. She thought there might have been a carpet underfoot, muffling the echo of slippers on cold stone. She must have paused in front of that portrait a hundred times, idly considering that she would wear a dress like her mother someday and put her hand on the arm of a man like her father.

She remembered her reflection in a mirror. There was another face beside her own, older but unmistakably related. Her mother -- it must have been her mother -- rested her hand on her daughter's shoulder and turned to answer a deep voice --

Carmilla snatched hungrily at the memory, and it spun away from her and into whisper-fine pieces. It was the last time she would ever recall her mother's face or her father's voice, though she couldn't have known that then. The carpet and the mirror and the portrait and her parents were tucked behind the doors of that house. And though Carmilla would sometimes hike her skirts above her knees and run and run and run, the house would only pull farther out of reach. It was a half-seen, uncertain thing, like peering through a carriage window into a hazy, gaslit street. Like the suggestion of figures in a shadowed alley. Although, too often, she had been that shadowed figure, the monster in the gloom.

Of course, those memories were always at hand. The day she had left her human life behind was a clear point in her mind, but Maman was clearer yet. Time could wear away the corners of any memory, but not this one, not Maman. Not the memory of the woman who made her. Who had taken someone she loved away from her. That would never fade.

Again, Carmilla saw her face in a mirror, but it was different now. The lines were sharper, the eyes darker. There was something about her mouth that said she had known death. Had known it in an intimate way: the final, desperate throb of a pulse beneath her fingertips. Warm blood spilling into her mouth. The girl in the mirror knew the taste of endings: copper, bitter. Familiar.

The second face in the mirror bore no physical resemblance to her own, but the mouth was the same. _My kaiserin, my diamond,_ Maman crooned. She brushed Carmilla's hair until it shone a deep brown that swallowed the candlelight.

Deep in the coffin, deep in the earth, something inside Carmilla hardened.

 _Alright, Mother. A diamond._ She clung to that thought. The conviction grew in her, pulsing in her veins in spite of her still heart. She would have her revenge. Carmilla could picture it -- Maman cowering, defeated at her feet. That hateful mouth forming the question-- _why?_

 _Why, Maman,_ she would say, throwing Maman's own smile back at her. _I am only what you made me._

She turned that scene over in her mind, imagining and reimagining every possible iteration. Only her revenge mattered, a scene that bloomed vividly against the dark theater of her eyelids. It was the single burning thing that sustained her, and so she did not sense the years passing.

Her childhood house pulled farther out of reach, and she no longer ran towards it. Ell's eyes -- they were brown, she knew, but she had forgotten the quality of them, and she hardly noticed. The gaslit fog thickened around her memories until they echoed distantly, a conversation heard in passing from a far away room. They happened in another time and another place to another girl. A stranger with a cruel mouth who had killed many times and liked it. Who had loved once and lost it.

***

When the wayward shell split the earth and dented the iron lid of her prison, Carmilla tasted sharp winter air for the first time in over seventy years. Blind and graceless, she clawed her way from the gaping lips of the coffin. The metal was jagged and raw and it tore at her chemise and scored ragged tracks in her skin. Bright runnels of her own blood soaked into the age-thinned fabric, already deeply stained the color of old wine.

She rolled heavily onto her back and tried to open her eyes. They were rusted shut, caked with clotted blood, and it took her several moments to pry her eyelids apart. When she finally managed it, the pale winter sun cored into her retinas, and she raised a shaking hand to block the sudden light. A bright corona of green and red and yellow fire danced against the back of her bloody hand.

Although she did not have a name for it then, it was a tank shell that had gouged a broad crater into the frostbitten field, churning the frozen ground into a confusion of hot, twisted metal, melting ice and clots of dirt, roots and brittle winter grass. Her coffin jutted awkwardly, ripped from a deep slot like the broken black bone of the earth.

A stone dug into the small of Carmilla's back. Her eyes stung and leaked tears, and her skin itched beneath its flaking patina of old blood. The bright sun burned on her face, and the cold earth burned against her back. The cuts -- the coffin's last parting gifts -- were bright, fresh pains that bled sluggishly. And it was wonderful.

She laughed then. The sound scraped from her throat, rusty and harsh. She laughed until she cried, and even after that.

It was some time before she rose. Her legs shook, but she locked her knees. She wouldn't stay in this pit a moment longer. She was -- truly free. Of the rotting tomb of blood, of Maman, of _obligation_. She belonged only to herself, and she embraced the dizzying emptiness, the knowledge that each step taken was a choice.

She walked off the battlefield, leaving rust-colored footprints in the frost.

***

Carmilla stands on the balcony of a hotel room, unconsciously running her hands over the strange fabric of her blouse. A brassiere clasped at her back cups her breasts, and she wears nylons and a knee-length skirt. In truth, they are ugly things, old clothes repurposed in the spirit of wartime austerity. They feel strange on Carmilla's body, but deliciously so.

In the time that she had been imprisoned, she found that the world had been tamed. There were roads where there had once been dirt tracks, plowed fields that had once been thick forest, and tidy towns dotted the countryside in such profusion that she imagined the world's population must have doubled or tripled in her absence.

Only the stars were truly old. She had missed them most, and that first night of freedom she had stared and stared and stared, hungry and aching. The stars were familiar companions, and they had pointed the way to a half-remembered village that lay just over a rise to the north.

The village was now a bustling town, but that was alright. It made it easier for Carmilla to procure a set of clothes and her first meal in decades. The blood was hot and coppery and bracing and familiar, laced with some sort of cheap, bitter liquor. She had forgotten that. She had forgotten the world, and it had spun on and become something new -- something brighter and greater and wider, and she had all the time in the world to see it.

It is cold out. Icy, actually, and she knows she should go inside for appearance's sake, but she can’t quite bring herself to shut out the stars. They wink down at her out of the black, older than she will ever be, and that is comforting.

Then.

Something heavy settles in the space between her lungs. It pierces deeply and seems to pin her down, a shiny black beetle on a board. It is a sharp thing made all out of fear and the selfish self-preservation that has helped her survive centuries by her mother's side. It undermines what small strength she has gathered over long years in the dark, and the hardness she has built cracks, insect-brittle. There is finality in the feeling, a sense of something shriveling and collapsing into her rotten heart before it has even begun.

She knows then that she will never exact the revenge she plotted with such fervor in her coffin. She can never bring herself to risk losing this new world. These clothes, this icy night, this _living_. She traces the beveled edge of a button, round and round.

The stars -- she can’t lose them. Not again.

She is too selfish and too frightened and she has never known strength beyond the unnatural physicality that comes with a thirst for blood and human life.

For a moment, Ell's eyes swim in her vision, two pinprick stars, just inches above her own. The weight of Ell's body presses into her, and her lips part slightly. Carmilla puts out a hand -- to steady herself, to draw Ell closer, she is never sure -- and the sensation vanishes, a distant, dying dream.

The truth is that she will not stay true -- to Ell, or to her revenge. She hugs herself, trapping the guilt that seethes in her chest, crushing it. When she looks to the stars again, they are distant and reproachful. She retreats indoors, angrily smearing away traitor tears that have frozen on her cheeks, hard as diamonds.

She is not brave. Not brave enough, at any rate.

She is only what her mother made her.

**Author's Note:**

> Alternative title: Carmilla Gets Grounded
> 
> This started as one thing and became another thing with some slithery return-to-the-womb vibes that I guess you can't avoid with a theme like this. So.
> 
> Thanks to the birb nerd who patiently edited this for me. We both know it was huge and ponderous the first eight times you looked at it, but you handled all that careful cutting and cinching with finesse. And my ego wasn't even half bruised along the way.
> 
> Shout out to Garth Nix for a piece of inspiration.


End file.
